Category: Lending (page 20 of 56)

Jeff Bezos resigns. Big yawn. He has to make more time to take Soros lessons.

What’s funnier about the swap is his replacement: Andy Jassy, the man who killed Parler and in so doing alienated thousands – perhaps millions – of Amazon’s retail customers, costing shareholders billions of dollars in the long run.

So I’m left to wonder: Is he really so good that he can make up for a billion-dollar blunder? Or is Amazon less in the retail business and more in the Soros business?

In other news:

Redfin: 2021 Housing Market Shaping Up to be Even Hotter than 2020.

CBNC: Mortgage refinancing suddenly surges, but homebuyers stall due to sticker shock.

Housing Wire: White homeownership rate hits nine-year high. Black homeownership, meanwhile, fell to 44.1% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

City Journal: New York’s Housing Refugees: The affordability crisis is a burden for residents and a drag on growth.

FEE.org: Local Kroger Stores Close as California ‘Hero Pay’ Ordinance Backfires.

Real Clear Politics: Enemies of the State vs. Enemies of the People.

City Journal: Secretary of Ethnic Studies? President Biden’s choice to lead the Education Department has a thin record—except in one trailblazing area.

Want to hear the most remarkable news in the past calendar year?

Jeopardy, the game show, had a perfect chance to piss off half or more of its audience – and it passed!

The most important thing any commercial entity can do right now is to overtly and repeatedly kiss Marxist ass in public, no matter how many of its long-standing customers it alienates.

Don’t believe me? Good grief: NASCAR, NFL, NBA – even the NHL. Fox News, Kohl’s, Sephora. Still don’t believe me? Watch the commercials on TV and try to figure our what is being sold to whom. Just don’t try to sell anything to white female voice actresses: They’re cancelled as a class.

But Jeopardy, when presented with the chance to go with the flow, chose instead to stick with the dough: If Katie Couric insults the audience, she’s fired.

I’m calling this The Jeopardy Line, the refusal to destroy your business in the foolish pursuit of approbation from totalitarians. We’ll see if Jeopardy can hold the line, and we can watch in wonder as once-great commercial enterprises devour themselves – live on TV.

In other news:

City Journal: Remotely Competitive: Cities and regions are betting that working from home is the next big thing in economic development.

Willamette Week: A Key Indicator of Real Estate Investors’ Interest in Portland Shows a Precipitous Decline.

David Marcus: Why Trump Should Press His Case On Voter Fraud.

Townhall: Whoa: We Now Know How Many Guns Were Purchased In January.

Jordan Davidson: Stanford Doctor: COVID Lockdowns Were An ‘Overreaction’ To ‘Protect The Rich’.

Angelo Codevilla: How Our Oligarchy Crushes Terrorism: The FBI’s increasing preference for political action over bona fide investigations is part of its overall decadence—laziness, incompetence, and eagerness to integrate with the ruling class.

Single people produce about as much wealth as they consume. Married fathers produce around five times as much wealth as they consume. The wealth of the West emerges not from scaled productivity – the Dc innovations the marketplace worships – but from the friendly Ds competition among fathers to better provide for their families.

Big duh, huh? Who knew…?

In other news:

Forbes: Death Of A City: The Portland Story?.

CNBC: Americans are flocking to the suburbs — here’s how much you need to earn to buy a house.

City Journal: Soft on Crime: A Biden administration policy of weak policing and lax prosecution would be a disaster for the nation’s cities.

American Greatness: Hijacking the Clown Car: The GameStop revolt should serve as a message to those in charge: you are loathed by ordinary Americans who are struggling to get ahead.

Roger Simon: How the Hydroxychloroquine Scandal Wrecked America and the World Along With It.

David Horowitz: A Tsunami of Hate: There is one party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent.

FEE.org: David Mamet Explains What Happens When the Experts Fail.

I like Aesop’s metaphor of the Grasshoppers and the Ants because it explains how (un)civil society is actually divided: Ants work and build while Grasshoppers play and prey – on Ants but also on other Grasshoppers.

Beginning with the Tea Party, all of Trumpism is a slave rebellion by the Ants against the Grasshoppers. As noted here and nowhere else, the ongoing exodus in the United States is Ants fleeing Grasshopper dominated cities and states. Gamestonk is belligerent Ants laying siege to apex-predator Grasshoppers. And now the Deep State is gearing up for an Ant pogrom – the gradual dehumanization and eventual extermination of as many Ants as possible.

Marxism is Grasshoppers devouring Ants, and, hence, it is necessarily self-extinguishing: Feasting on farmers leads to a gradual narrowing of dietary choices. But Marxism is the predation of all against any, so for now, alas, we need only think of ourselves as predators or prey.

Strive to be neither. God help you if you’re both.

In other news:

Karol Markowicz: The future is Florida.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Pandemic has more Twin Cities home buyers looking outward.

Rick Moran: Here’s Why Impeachment Will Backfire on Democrats and Make Trump Stronger.

Daniel Greenfield: Unite and Heal With Show Trials and Fascist Purges.

Clarice Feldman: You Will Be Made to Believe Implausible Things.

Yesterday, the putative “elite” struck back – twice. Not for Gamestonk and not even for Trump, specifically, but simply to put you in your place.

So, first, in response for a four-year domestic espionage and political interference operation unparalleled in American history, precisely one person was tried and convicted of crimes. He was sentenced yesterday. To probation.

And: An interstate domestic terrorist group was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

They’re not screwing with you, and it’s not just the Opposite Game. They are telling you what their values are: Murder and treason are literally noble in the pursuit of power.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Experts optimistic about home sales in 2021.

Wall Street Journal: Keith Gill Drove the GameStop Reddit Mania. He Talked to the Journal.

Chip Roy: Leftists Must Be Punished At The Ballot Box For Their COVID-19 Hypocrisy.

Reason: School Choice Spreads as Pandemic Public Education Falls Short. Never forget: Freedom emerges when tyranny retreats. Rejoice and be glad in it.

I saw this on Facebook, and it sums the world up perfectly:

Are the people who can get trading stopped in the middle of a trading day the same people who can get vote counting stopped in the middle of an election night?

Wall Street is red-pilling America so well that it is making the election fraud that much more plain.

We know we live in a two-tiered justice system, and yet we know we cannot do this and sustain a Ds economy. Leadership can try to wear other hats, but followership is a loyalty borne of mutual love.

Our would-be leaders are palpably self-seeking, and most do nothing to hide their contempt for ordinary people. This will not have happy consequences.

More underground Gamestop news:

is the squeeze squoze yet?: as of January 29, the squeeze has not been squoze.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates dip back down to 2.73%.

CNBC: December pending home sales drop as buyers face record high prices and low supply.

Redfin: 55% of Homes Under Contract Within 2 Weeks, a New Record.

Housing Wire: New home sales historically high in 2020.

Redfin: Housing Supply in Rural Areas Drops a Record 44%, Helping Drive the Overall Shortage of Homes for Sale.

Sean Davis: The GameStop Saga Isn’t About Finance, It’s Part Of The Ongoing War Between Elites And Populists.

Matt Taibbi: Suck It, Wall Street.

Daniel Greenfield: When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance.

Joel Kotkin: Woke Politics are a Disaster for Minorities.

David Marcus: How Equity Will Destroy America.

If you’re not following the GameStop saga, the first link is a better summary than you will find in the mainstream media. The whole episode is yet another sweet opportunity for the Ruling Class to expose itself as the Predator Class: They prey on you, fair game, but if turnabout is for once fair play, that’s “HATE SPEECH!”

In other news:

Patriots.win: On Gamestop, Why Hedge Funds Are Not the Good Guys, Why Redditards Are An Ally in this Particular Fight, and How MSM is Lying to Us (Again).

CNBC: The Fed won’t keep interest rates near zero forever — here’s what to do now.

Redfin: West Palm Beach Luxury Home Sales Soar a Record 116% In Fourth Quarter as Wall Street Moves South.

NOQ Report: Don’t be distracted by the ‘impeachment’ drama. The real threat to our republic is H.R. 1.

Angelo Codevilla: Dismounting the COVID Tiger.

The National Pulse: Trump Can Turn The Impeachment On The Insiders And Put Congress On ‘Trial’.

I had a run in with a Doctor of Education who could not reliably distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘effect.’ This is not rare, but it should be among people who think degrees matter. Plus, the answer is right there from the Anglicized Latin: A-, Ad- verbs are accusative in English; E-, Ex- verbs are ablative. I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I just said, “It’s easy. Just remember that ‘affect’ is accusative and ‘effect’ is ablative.”

That didn’t help. Probably didn’t help you, either, but my take would be that you can’t make sense without grammar and logic – the acquisition of either of which is likely to get you kicked right out of any American school of education.

Schoolteachers are dumb, as a rule – and dumber by the day in underfathered America. But wafting in on the breezes with all the imaginary coronavirus droplets is some good news: Because schoolteachers are too dumb to keep their jaws on the prey, some students are managing to escape their stultification.

You can lament that too many are still caught in the awful trap of public education, and I’ll join you in that. But I can celebrate that some slaves, at least, have made it to freedom.

In other news:

Zero Hedge: Home Prices Soar At 4.5 Times The Fed’s Inflation Target In All US Cities.

Housing Wire: Rising mortgage rates push applications lower.

CNBC: America’s top-tier malls were resilient, but values are now crumbling, down 45% from 2016 levels, Green Street says.

J.D. Tucille: As Teachers Unions and Bureaucrats Battle, Families Choose Alternative Schools.

City Journal: Narrative Before Facts: When will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?

Just don’t breathe.

That would be the advice of Dr. Fauci, who could be laughed off the planet tomorrow just by changing his political party registration.

Remember all the bullshit last Summer about how a drug saving lives all over the world could not be used here due to a lack of clinical trials? So why does a man who stood to profit by more expensive drugs now advise using two masks? “It just makes sense.”

To whom?

America is a Cs nation led by Ci cargo-cultists. We are not as good as Canadians at following orders, but we’re just not that Cs. Even so, the doofuses you see now driving while masked will soon be double-masked.

And traffic fatalities will soar, just as heart attack, cancer and suicide fatalities have soared while we stupidly listened to Dr. Fauci.

You can fault the Utilitarian calculation – “If it saves just one life.” Better yet, fault the gruesome inversion of that calculation: Kill two to save one – very temporarily. But best of all, fault the stupid “reasoning” that celebrates its mastery of one false proxy signal while the rest of the world goes up in flames.

Dr. Fauci is not evil. He’s just Ci in power. Disaster is baked in the cake.

In other news:

CNBC: November home prices rose 9.5%, one of the highest gains on record, Case-Shiller says.

Housing Wire: Zillow: Expect another record year for home sales.

Eye On Housing: The Missing Middle: A Solution for Adding More Housing.

Breitbart.com: Tech Workers Flee San Francisco.

Joel Kotkin: Making America California: The Biden administration seems determined to run the country on the ruinous model of the Golden State.

Seth Barron: Can New York Find a Better Leader?

Reason: Parents Who Opt Out of Public Schools Don’t Deserve Smears From Teachers Unions.

Just breed.

Come what does, the winners of he battle for civilization’s future will be the folks who out-bred all the others. I foresee that as being Ds – the only people left who choose to reproduce propitiously, given the choice – while I marvel at Ci’s ongoing self-extinction.

But: Prediction only gets you as far as yesterday. What matters is that men who want to preserve the West must meet, mate, marry and meld with the mothers of their children. The philosophical content of a Testudo dad’s teachings matter less than that he shields his family from the enemy’s noxious notions.

A viable culture is reproductive not just of its people but of itself: It is sustained across generations by generations of people who see it as being worth sustaining. That happens because sons admire their fathers – and because they don’t want to shame them. However you find it, that’s what you’re looking for.

In other news:

Joy Pullman: How To Stop Using Google Search On Your Computer And Phone.

Tyler O’Neil: Tulsi Gabbard on Dems’ Terror Law: ‘We Don’t Have to Guess About Where This Goes or How This Ends’.

John Tierney: The New Censors: Journalists celebrate the destruction of freedoms on which their profession depends.

Nick Gillespie: Glenn Greenwald: ‘Journalists Are Authoritarians’.

Josh Hawley: It’s time to stand up against the muzzling of America.

Victor Davis Hanson: The River of Forgetfulness.

Sebastian Gorka: Trump Will Return.

Kelli Ward was reelected as the Grand Poobah of the Arizona Republican Party last night. Local news with national importance: Against heavy opposition from the Cindy McCain wing of the Deep State, pro-Trump forces retain control of the state party. That argues that we may see electoral reform over the next two years.

I don’t know that it’s possible to get out of this mess without bloodshed, but, if it is, we need electoral reform in every state – by legislation where possible, by Federal civil rights suits in Marxist strongholds.

In other news:

Zero Hedge: People In These Five States Say ‘Get Me Outta Here’.

OutKick: Jeff Bezos, Amazon Refuting Mail-in Votes For Unionization.

Charles Hurt: Charles Hurt: Trump Feared More Now Than Ever.

Salena Zito: Why the US Hispanic conservative movement is surging.

American Thinker: ‘Moving on from President Trump’ is a Failing Strategy for the GOP.

Matt Taibbi: The Echo Chamber Era: Trust in media is down, but if journalists don’t listen to critics anyway, why should they care?

As expected, the Coronavirus hysteria can now safely abate, since fomenting terror is no longer useful for preventing voters from having their choice as president.

You just watched the Ruling Class pull out all the stops – lying blatantly about everything associated with the virus, destroying the world’s economy, impoverishing billions, killing millions – to prevent, disrupt and corrupt the election. You know that’s true, just as you knew all along that Hydroxychloroquine is an effective therapeutic and prophylactic.

I foresaw the deliberate crashing of the economy – and Trump’s aborning new center party – coming on five years ago, but I am proud to say that I did not envision the craven sociopathy of it all: These people are indifferent to all life. They literally let millions die from what is very probably a Marxist bio-weapon to put down the President Fallguy who was too good at being president to fall on his own, like a Republican should.

So: When it turns out that the rushed, untested vaccine is most effective at inhibiting pregnancy, please don’t pretend to be surprised. They’ve already made it plain they want you gone from the earth.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Real Estate Agents May Work Against Buyers’ Interests With Shortened Contract Contingencies.

In other news:

Housing Wire: 2020 home sales hit highest level since 2006. Nothing scary about that headline…

CNBC: Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says his start-ups are skipping over Silicon Valley.

Jordan Davidson: Woman Behind Bernie Sanders’ Iconic Mittens Quit Making Them Because High Taxes Killed Her Business.

Don Surber: The impeachment is about legitimizing Biden.

Charles Hurt: With Impeachment, Congress Trying to Overturn Future Elections.

Libertas Bella: China Owns Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America.

Jeffrey Lord: Joe Biden: The New George Wallace.

I address the idea of scaling in “Nine Empathies” – the empathy for the idea itself that enables us to grow so far beyond other animals: To farm is to feed your family, but to teach farming is to feed millions, and to master and teach the theory of farming is to feed seven billion bellies every day.

Much warned since the days of the Robber Barons, we have arrived at scaled humans: Jack Dorsey can silence the President of the United States, who in his turn can do – what? Jack squat. The tech oligarchs, at least, and perhaps all billionaires – minus Trump – have scaled: They can destroy anyone at will, and no one – not even the man who brought Kim Jung Un to heel – can do anything about it.

In the links, Charlie Kirk is begging Elon Musk to save-us-obi-wan-scoobydoo!, and he thinks he’s just making entreaties among everyday crime bosses. Why Don Corleone is the preferred mafioso – and why he, too, won’t turn on Turning Point – is a mystery, but here’s worse news for Charlie:

Elon Musk has scaled on the tech oligarchs. He has the high perch and the ability to fake meteor strikes – garage-band ‘rods from god’ – and soon he will have nukes in space. At the moment he is sui generis – homo novis, 3G-humanity – and if he wanted to take over everything right now, he probably could.

Damn one dam and it’s a brand new day – for somebody. Swallow hard on that…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts hit highest pace since 2006.

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Homebuyers Undeterred by Declining Listings—Pending Sales up 32%, New Listings Down 10%.

Housing Wire: Hispanic households to grow the most over next 20 years.

The Epoch Times: Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn.

Charlie Kirk: Elon Musk Should Build Us a Better Internet.

Christopher Bedford: The Fracturing Of America: A Weak Government, Complicit Media, And Radical Silicon Valley Might Have Finally Set It All Off.

The year 2020, by far the most momentous since 2001, was eclipsed in its entirety by yesterday, when these unthinkable events transpired:

• America, the land of the free, and all of its people and assets were sold into slavery to the Red Chinese.
• Even more amazingly, America’s national security apparatus, America’s military arsenal and all its military secrets were ceded to the Red Chinese.
• Hong Kong is to have fallen.
• Taiwan is to have fallen.
• And the entire network of American alliances – from Nato to the Five Eyes military intelligence compact – is compromised.

Entirely on script, the first suicide bombing in Baghdad in (ahem) four years took place yesterday. Too much peace. Too much plenty. America got tired of all the winning.

What happened yesterday was Ci reasserting itself. It had an awful 2020, but the entire Trump phenomenon – hugely Ds at the grass roots – has been awful for Ci.

Here’s the good news: Ci is inept in practical realty. It can’t change its own tires, much less its own oil. It depends eternally on people who are not Ci to effect its aims – typically Cs in an ordinary stable theocracy, anyone it can enslave in our current unstable technocracy. What happens when a queen bee is abandoned by her drones. She dies – outraged but nevertheless inept.

Here’s the bad news: Ci in power slaughters thousands and millions of innocents on its way down.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 2.77%.

CNBC: Spike in lumber and land prices causes homebuilder confidence to fall from epic high.

Redfin: Out-of-Towners Moving Into Nashville, Atlanta and Austin Have More Than 30% Bigger Homebuying Budgets Than Locals.

Angelo Codevilla: Clarity in Trump’s Wake.

Frontpage: Capturing the False Flag: What really happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Frontpage: Thank You, Mr. President: You were magnificent.

American Thinker: The ruling class against Trump.

Tristan Justice: Welcome To A Biden White House, And The Next Chapter Of The Trump Era.

John Hinderaker: Trump Fought The Swamp and The Swamp Won.

Heather MacDonald: Words of Division: Cloaked in an appeal to unity, President Biden’s inaugural speech hit all the expected themes of racial resentment and Read more